4. Attacking the enemy is a
primary function of the Fathers Rights resistance movement

5. Precious energy and resources wasted
trying to ‘educate’ enemies

III Fathers Rights
as a resistance movement

1.
Micro-level resistance—the individual court case

2.
Macro-level resistance—everywhere else!

2.1 Bringing
the War to the streets: Counter-demonstrations

2.2 Bringing the War to the courts

2.3 Study
Wars: Bringing the War to the university halls

IV Summary

Appendix:
The Real Wheel of Abuse

The working title of this
paper was “A blueprint for a Fathers Rights resistance movement.” However, as
the writing proceeded and the paper grew with each editing session, at some
point I realized writing a comprehensive, detailed blueprint for building a
Fathers Rights movement was a book-length task. What I have written is really
an overview of the issues that should be considered toward constructing
an actual blueprint for a successful Fathers Rights movement.

I
Preliminaries—understanding the problem

The problem—the systematic
discrimination, persecution, and now criminalization of fathers by
virtue of their classification as “non-custodial parents” by the courts—has
been in existence for the better part of 30 years.

The problem shows no sign of
abating. Largely speaking, it is an invisible problem. The first question that
needs to be asked and answered is: Why has there been no progress in all this
time?

Finger-pointing is a staple
of the Fathers Rights community. It has always existed because it is quite
natural for a failed movement to explain away its failure by assigning blame.

1. Cultural context of
the Fathers Rights movement

The problem is huge and
multi-faceted, on this all agree. But what has to be comprehended first is the
social and cultural environment within which this problem, and our movement,
exists.

Parallels with other civil
rights movements for “social justice” are often given to suggest how our
movement should reframe itself to succeed. But there are no other civil rights
movements analogous to what I refer to as the War on Fatherhood, and here’s
why.

What have been the
socio-political movements that have defined our recent history? Certainly the
Civil Rights movement for African-Americans immediately springs to mind.
Despite the fact that slavery ended a century earlier after the Civil War,
racial injustice continued. The great Civil Rights movement of the sixties
sought to end all the latent discrimination against black Americans that
persisted.

A decade later, the women’s
movement took full flight. “Women’s lib” and “feminism” became household
words.

Presently, the latest class
of people demanding attention from the identity politics crowd is homosexuals.
Since it is debatable whether or not this aggrieved class is produced by
“accidents of birth” as is true for racial and sexual distinctions—and also
because the normalization of homosexuality is very much an evolving paradigm—I
remove it from this discussion, but note that same-sex marriage and gay
adoption are indeed issues that have significant bearing on Fathers Rights.

It cannot be denied that
until these “social justice” movements of the sixties and seventies emerged,
the white male dominated society. He may not have always ruled his family,
hearth and home, but he overwhelmingly dominated positions of money, power and
influence virtually everyplace else.

Both of these movements for
“social justice” were unidirectional, that is, movement in one direction only:
empowering people of color at the expense of ethnic European whites and women
at the expense of men. In such a political environment it is virtually
impossible for initiatives that intentionally favor whites at the expense of
non-whites or men at the expense of women to see the light of day, let alone
gain any political traction. This is realpolitik, and has nothing to do with
the merits of any particular issue or cause.

But these two movements are
not at the same stage. Black empowerment is mature, in the sense that the
pendulum has gone as far as it is going to go, and we now begin to see a
paradigm shift away from the excesses of “white guilt.” It is a given that
within a few years racial preferences, aka affirmative action, will be
declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and will hopefully disappear
altogether.

The women’s empowerment
movement, on the other hand, thrives. The light at the end of the
tunnel is not yet visible. It is said that we now live in a “post-feminist”
world. Implicit in the use of this language is an acknowledgement that this
feminist revolution is irreversible. It is still anathema for a politician to
even pay lip service to a legislative or public policy initiative that would
result in disempowering women to the benefit of men. Exhibit A is the grilling
Justice Samuel Alito endured by Sen. Dianne Feinstein during his confirmation
hearings. Alito was called to task on his dissent on Planned Parenthood v.
Casey[1],
where he opposed the majority on the judicial panel who ruled that a woman in
an intact marriage has no legal or moral obligation to even inform—let alone
seek the permission of—her husband, if she wants to abort a pregnancy.

I submit there is no better
example of the dire state of the emasculation of men at the hands of the
feminist revolution, where it is considered repugnant to even suggest that a
husband has a right to be informed if his wife is pregnant and intends to
abort—i.e., to kill his own unborn child without his knowledge!

But wait, there’s more!

After granting women the
exclusive right to take the life of their unborn children, it hasn’t taken
long for women to gain the power to actually kill their husbands, get away
with it, and keep the kids to boot.

Mary Winkler, convicted of
voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to just three years in jail for the 2006
shooting death of her minister husband, Matthew Winkler, served a total of 12
days in jail and two months in a mental health facility. Earlier this month
she was released and given her three kids back, though formal custody of them
is still pending as the slain minister’s parents are not happy at having to
turn the kids over to the woman who shot their son in the back with a shotgun.
Yet the “jury found her guilty of voluntary manslaughter after she testified
about suffering from years of physical and emotional abuse by her husband.”[2]

These judicial atrocities are
examples of “feminist jurisprudence”: the manifestation and injection of
feminism, the social theory, into the legal sphere.

If you accept that we live in
a non-reversible post-feminist world, you might as well give up now and sue
for terms.

The Fathers Rights movement
implicitly seeks to regain power that men have lost; consequently, this
means it needs to disempower women. It is pure denial and a strategic error to
believe otherwise. For fathers to gain custody rights of their children and
freedom from criminalization based on a woman’s allegation of “abuse,” etc.,
the power that women presently possess to do these things must be taken away.

Therefore, before any grand
strategy for gaining “shared parenting” rights and such can take place, the
reality of the cultural, social and political environment that presently does
not comprehend anything contrary to the empowering of women must be
acknowledged and addressed. Only then will rational strategizing and a
coherent battle plan be possible. To paraphrase the classic line from Paul
Newman’s film Cool Hand Luke, the Fathers Rights movement must first,
“get its mind right.”

2. Fathers Rights as a
counter-revolution

The Fathers Rights movement
is essentially a counter-revolutionary movement. It seeks to overturn the
feminist cultural revolution that has ruled the roost for the better part of
two generations and counting. Once you understand this, it becomes clear that
the Fathers Rights movement does not and cannot exist in a vacuum. The
feminist sociology professor who teaches college freshmen that the patriarchy
and the biological nuclear family are relics of a more primitive,
unenlightened world... the social worker who interviews women and children
entering the hospital emergency room to see if they are victims of domestic
violence... the English teacher who includes Alice Walker rather than William
Shakespeare in her syllabus... the U.S. senator and presidential candidate who
brags about writing VAWA... the lesbian sociology professor who has her
“Marriage and the Family” students fill out cards for the Statehouse
supporting gay marriage... the conservative news show host on Fox who
occasionally trots out a Fathers Rights advocate to make sport of him... etc.,
etc., all are part of the problem—not just the judge who took your
child and granted your wife an abuse protection order!

II Fighting back

Essentially we are talking
about a propaganda war, a war of information—more correctly, of disinformation.
Clearly, therefore, a huge part of the problem is public perception.To employ the much overused cliché: we are engaged in a very real sense
in a war of hearts and minds.

It is my contention that a
war for hearts and minds cannot be won by disingenuous and deceptive methods,
and the efforts so far to disguise the problem into a more politically
palatable form is the first of the many cardinal mistakes of the Fathers
Rights movement.

Any analysis of propaganda
begins and ends with language. Using the verbiage of your enemy is the
metaphorical equivalent of allowing the opposing army to choose the
battlefield. The language used is the battlefield of the propaganda war
we are engaged in. The lexicon of our enemy includes using the
socially-constructed “gender” in place of the biologically determined “sex,”
“parent” instead of “mother” or “father,” “partner” rather than “husband” or
“wife,” “choice” rather than “abortion,” and even “abuser” and “batterer” as
synonyms for men who fight for custody of their children.

We need to create our own
lexicon, and promulgate its use throughout the movement. “Fathers Rights”
should be punctuated as a proper noun. It is a proper name, the name of our
movement. Hence, it is capitalized, and no apostrophe.

1. This is a
Fathers Rights movement

For as long as I have been
involved in the movement, the predominant paradigm held that awareness of the
problem can gain no traction because of an innate reverse-sexism in society.
This is no doubt true, but the error comes in choosing how to react. The
overwhelming “wisdom” of the intelligentsia in the movement believes that
approaching the problem in a gender-neutral fashion and focusing on the
children will circumvent the innate bias against recognizing men, as a class,
as victims.

One would think that the
abject failure of all various “parent’s” or “children’s” rights
organizations and approaches over the past decades would have by now convinced
everyone that this is very bad advice. But unfortunately this crippled logic
persists and indeed flourishes throughout the movement.

Again: hearts and minds
cannot and will not be won over by disingenuous, “clever”
marketing/branding/messaging. Perhaps the best example of the failure of this
approach is the Children’s Rights Council. This organization took scrupulous
care in grooming its image and message as one about children—and not
about fathers; that children’s well-being is best ensured by the care
and companionship of both of their parents.

The CRC recruited prominent
credentialed women as spokespeople and board members to promote
their warm, fuzzy message. But this changed nothing. Politicians as well as
the media remained unresponsive. This is because any effects of law and policy
changes recommended by the CRC—even though framed exclusively from the
perspective of the well-being of children—would enhance the rights of
fathers at the expense of power wielded by women. And this is obvious to
all—and even if not obvious to some particular politician, feminists would
make damn sure they “got religion.”

The problem of children being
denied their parents is overwhelmingly one of children being denied their
fathers. Everyone knows this. Women who happen to find themselves on the
wrong end of a child support order—or, even more rarely, an abuse protection
order—are collateral damage. They have been hit by “friendly fire.” Therefore,
to correct the problem of children suffering without the care and
companionship of both of their parents, the power of women to veto the
involvement of the father, given to them by the state via the family court,
has to be curtailed.

Again, hearts and minds
cannot be won by impure and disingenuous strategies. Virtually everyone knows
a sales pitch when they see one. This fundamental dishonesty in describing the
problem and then expecting sympathy and support is doomed to fail. A
successful Fathers Rights resistance movement requires authenticity, not a
slicker marketing campaign.

Let us embrace the problem
for what it is. Let us mean what we say and say what we mean. We will
discover that more hearts and minds—of men and women—will open to our
message when we dispense with the tactical, “clever,” marketing-driven
messaging and strategies.

Here is the real
problem, restated. This is how it should be presented, because this is the
truth:

Women have been empowered by the state to criminalize the
fathers of their children. Financial incentives via usurious child support
awards encourage women to use the power that the state gives them toseverely restrict the father’s relationship with his child or to simply
remove him from the picture entirely. This is only the beginning of a much
larger problem. As a consequence, a third of all children in our nation now
grow up without their fathers. The social science is virtually unanimous in
acknowledging the unique developmental benefits to children raised by a father
(not that it should be necessary to obtain the seal of approval from
behavioral “experts” for something that is manifestly obvious to anyone with a
lick of sense). The statistics of criminal behavior, social and behavioral
pathologies that correlate unerringly to father absence scream out for an
overthrowing of the present feminist paradigm in domestic relations law and
policy and a return to common sense. Father absence is a social cancer that
has virtually unlimited repercussions throughoutevery facet of modern life.

2. The War on
Fatherhood

English is the richest of all
languages. It has far more words to describe far more shades of meaning than
any other language. Fortunately, it provides a word thatencompasses all aspects of this tragedy: fatherhood. The
relationship between a father and his child, and all that flows from it. There
is no need to speak of harm done to fathers and children separately. What is
under attack is the very institution of fatherhood. The messaging that
directly and unambiguously addresses the real problem is “War on Fatherhood.”

This messaging implicitly
targets the notions of “blended families,” single motherhood as well as gay
marriage and gay adoption.

Entry point to the Fathers
Rights resistance movement: Do you acknowledge the problem and are you willing
to fight your enemy?

The Fathers Rights
resistance movement has a front door. Permission to enter is granted to those
willing to acknowledge the true problem and sign on to the declaration below.
This assures that the movement is truly “on message,” and prevents the
foolishness that has pervaded for so long from diverting energy and resources
from developing a coherent resistance movement.

I believe there is a War on Fatherhood.

I am enlisting in the war effort to fight against those
that are waging this war on me, my children, and the institution of
fatherhood.

Signed and dated: ______________________

3. The fundamental cause of the problem

Like the blind men handling
different parts of the elephant and all disagreeing about its shape, our
movement is notorious for misunderstanding the fundamental cause of the War on
Fatherhood. The most common misdiagnosis is the belief that it is all about
money and the state’s corruption and relentless quest for power. It is
undeniably true that federal and state regimes that profit from creating NCP
(noncustodial parent) fathers/child support obligors have “built the perfect
beast” that perpetuates the problem—but this is not the source of the
problem. The domestic violence, child abuse, supervised visitation regimes
that generate so much revenue and employment were not created solely
out of a desire for revenue.

I think of this “perfect
beast” as a skyscraper. Title IV-d, VAWA, state child support and domestic
abuse regimes are the superstructure of the skyscraper, not its foundation.
They are the steel trusses and girders upon which are laid the floors and
offices that populate the skyscraper—where the actual workaday work is done by
the busy-bee bureaucrats that grease the wheels of this “beast.”

Attempts to fix the problem
that focus just on the office workers, or try to tear the building down by
attacking its superstructure alone, will not work. As long as the foundation
is intact, the skyscraper can and will be repaired or rebuilt. We need to find
a cure for the disease itself, rather than administering palliatives for its
symptoms.

The fundamental cause of the
problem has been clearly identified for years, but men in the Fathers Rights
movement have stubbornly resisted acknowledging it. It is no coincidence that
most if not all of the people that have publicly identified the fundamental
problem are women: Phyllis Schlafly, Kathleen Parker, Christina Hoff Sommers
and Erin Pizzey come immediately to mind as some of the more articulate women
who speak directly to the consequences of men’s collective failure to stand up
to feminism.

As was explained in the
previous section, the fundamental source of the problem is a sociological and
cultural movement that began in earnest about 40 years ago: women’s
empowerment, aka feminism. The feminist movement seeks the empowerment of
women. It does not seek equality of the sexes. Its open-ended goal is the
transformation of what was hitherto a patriarchal society into a matriarchy.

This is not secret
information. It is taught to practically every college student who needs to
satisfy a behavioral science or general education requirement. In sociology
and women’s studies classes, patriarchy is taught alongside such other
socio-political pathologies as racism, colonialism and Nazism. A tremendous
amount of agenda-driven, pseudo-scientific, social science research constantly
streams out of universities. This “research” is regurgitated within classrooms
to impressionable students of both sexes, who then take this knowledge with
them into the real world upon graduation and use it to inform their work as
doctors, lawyers, police officers, judges, social workers, politicians,
reporters, and ... teachers... completing the vicious cycle.

Treating fathers who fight
for custody of their children as batterers and a presumed danger to their
children is only to be expected when considering the indoctrination all
the actors in these court tragedies receive as part of their education and
training. If this were not so, how would it be possible that such a wholesale
abrogation of rights of one half of the adult population would go unnoticed by
the media? In a world with a ravenous appetite for scandal, force-fed by a
media industry that respects practically no restraints on “the people’s right
to know,” how is it possible that injustices of the magnitude experienced by
fathers under the color of law on a daily basis go unreported?

The reason is cultural. The
reason is sociological. And to cure this disease, cultural and sociological
paradigms must be challenged and overthrown. It can’t be avoided.

Conspiracy is defined as “An
agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.” The
“Real Wheel of Abuse” (Appendix), illustrates the causal relationship
between feminist propaganda in academia, the media, legislation, the rape of
fatherhood in the courts, the social costs of father absence and domestic
violence. What we face is, quite literally, a conspiracy.

Men have allowed feminists to
define the terms of debate, to metaphorically choose the terrain of the
battlefield. At legislative hearings on shared parenting and abuse protection
reform bills, Fathers Rights advocates plead with legislators that the present
laws are being used unfairly against fathers and that as a consequence
children lose their fathers. Feminists testifying in opposition warn
legislators about the dangers to women from their “abusive,” batterer husbands
or boyfriends, quote statistics from pseudo-scientific, agenda-driven research
about the epidemic of violence against women, and occasionally trot out
“survivors” as witnesses to hammer the point home: Don’t you dare support
these batterers and their anti-woman legislation!

Every veteran of the custody
wars knows that in the courtroom, any charges made by one side that are not
rebutted are held to be true. But on the macro level, men don’t seem able to
translate this knowledge into the political arena.

To date, men have been
fighting for Fathers Rights by taking a defensive approach—only!
Feminists have been attacking men, masculinity and the
patriarchy. They tell legislators in no uncertain terms that the few men
who fight for custody of their children and lose do so because they are unfit
and/or batterers. They promulgate the lie that women rarely lie about domestic
violence. They have somewhat successfully defined Fathers Rights advocates as
“the batterer lobby.”

And in response, men merely
quotevarious studies showing how children
benefit from a relationship with the father, plead that child support in
Massachusetts is unreasonably high, and some are bold enough to argue for
tweaking the abuse protection laws because they are often used by women as a
tactic to gain custody of children. On this last item, it should be mentioned
that the conventional wisdom in our movement holds that gaining shared
parenting legislation must be the first objective, and then, afterwards, we
should turn our attention to fixing the domestic violence laws. This is
another cardinal error of the movement, since shared parenting legislation is
held up because of the (usually back room) objections by domestic violence
feminazis. When they say “Jump!” our legislators ask “How high?” We cannot
get shared parenting laws passed unless the domestic violence feminazis have
first been de-fanged. Fixing so-called “abuse prevention” laws should
have the highest legislative priority, not the lowest.

And this backward thinking on
legislation is symptomatic of another cardinal error of the movement: failure
to actually attack our enemies. In legislative hearings, for example, Fathers
Rights advocates never see fit to attack the very people who demonize them!
They are so afraid of being labeled “misogynist” that they never even think to
do what they know they have to do when fighting their own cases in the
courtroom.

A sports analogy is called
for. The predominant strategy of Fathers Rights to date can be compared to
insisting on keeping your entire soccer team within the penalty box to
maximize defense and minimize the number of goals scored against you. It is
unlikely that you will succeed in keeping the ball out of your net for over 90
minutes, but it is a certainty that you will never score a goal if your team
never ventures out of the penalty box and—heaven forbid!—beyond the
midfield line into enemy territory.

4. Attacking the enemy
is a primary function of the Fathers Rights resistance movement

The successful Fathers Rights
resistance movement must have an aggressive, offensive strategy. This will
include investigating the public and private lives of our opponents, digging
up the dirt and flinging the mud. How many purported “battered women
advocates” who are exposed as violent themselves will it take before the seeds
of skepticism bear fruit in the minds of the public, and eventually,
legislators?

The Fathers Rights
resistance movement must dedicate a sizeable fraction of all its resources and
energy to offensive actions and activities that directly attack its enemies.

The enemy is all individuals
and agencies that through their beliefs and actions work to promote the War on
Fatherhood.

Here is a short list of some
of our local enemies:

§Feminazi attorneys such as Wendy Murphy and
Gloria Allred.

§Marilyn Ray Smith, (once?) Chief Legal Counsel
of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, Child Support Enforcement division
(DOR/CSE), and chief architect of the original Massachusetts Child Support
Guideline.

§Judges that clearly get pleasure from
figuratively raping fathers in family court, such as (now retired) Judge
Edward Ginsburg.

§Feminist, anti-father Guardians ad litem such as
Lundy Bancroft and the frighteningly large number of homosexual GALs and
family court judges who advertise their dysfunctional lifestyles on
their own web sites.

§Media outlets that are thoroughly biased in
favor of women, such as The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

§Domestic violence feminazis such as Toni Troop
and all feminazi domestic violence agencies such as Massachusetts’ Jane
Doe, Inc.

§Feminized politicians who toe the feminist line
on social issues and policies such as Mass. governor Deval Patrick and
Delaware Sen. Joe Biden who authored VAWA. Ignorance does not excuse evil.
Evil is as evil does.

This list is as long as you
want to make it. It should include all feminist academicians who are
brainwashing students in our schools, colleges and universities. First
discredit, then demonize. If at all possible, criminalize. Dig up dirt. Try to
destroy their reputations and their careers. If you can, cause them financial
and economic hardship. In such endeavors, the enemy of your enemy is your
friend. Make alliances with people who have a different, perhaps completely
unrelated beef with these enemies. Share information and work together to
cause them harm.

5. Precious energy and
resources wasted trying to ‘educate’ enemies

One of the most frustrating
things is watching new activists, particularly well educated and professional
men, “discover” that the reason why the movement never makes progress is
because the Fathers Rights crowd have an image problem: they present
themselves and are perceived as angry men who have become unbalanced by the
bad experiences of their divorce. Politicians often take these newbies aside
and give them the “inside word” in private meetings. The gullible new Fathers
Rights activist, champing at the bit to gain respectability, then spends
inordinate amounts of time, energy and resources trying to educate these
politicians, making sure that they themselves present the proper image,
eschewing anger and avoiding any negative talk about women or feminism, and
above all, never showing anger.

I submit that one of the
reasons for failure is that there haven’t been enough angry fathers
together at the same time and place.

Here in Massachusetts, two
examples come to mind. The first from several years ago when a well-meaning
new activist sought to educate Margaret Marshall, the chief justice of the
Supreme Judicial Court. Countless letters were sent, and posted to our
list-server.

Most recently, an incredible
amount of time, energy and resources have been spent attempting to educate
Governor Deval Patrick. After all, the governor created a blog area on his web
site specifically for citizen input. Tremendous amounts of energy were spent
to move a shared parenting thread to the very top of this list.

Despite warnings that Deval
Patrick, whether sincere or not, had already been thoroughly indoctrinated by
the other side—his wife was a domestic violence zealot, he was raised without
a father, he was a lifelong, liberal Democrat, etc.—and that he was already
“well educated” on these issues being a thoroughly feminized college-educated
resident of Massachusetts, these Fathers Rights activists had to find out for
themselves. So, two years later, when pressed at a public meeting in the
Berkshires, Patrick finally admitted that Fathers Rights was not going to be
his “particular focus”:

“The sort of the running debate between us is about trying to get me to
champion this issue rather than the forty legislatures you have working on it,
and I keep deferring because I got some other things on my list. It's not that
I don't care. It's not that I am not sympathetic to the issues that you’re
having with your daughter and your ex-wife and so on-it's just not my
particular focus. And I know that every time we're together you want to make
it my particular focus.”[3]

Now, two years later, they
more or less acknowledge that it was a waste of time.

The frustration on my part
comes from wondering what could have been accomplished if instead of wasting
all that energy trying to educate a known enemy, that same amount of energy
was spent attacking Deval Patrick (after, naturally, at least one
obligatory overture to him had been made). Perhaps nothing, but at least he
would have been made aware that he had been targeted by a voting block.

III Fathers Rights as
a resistance movement

Because of the tremendous
damage done to fatherhood via child support orders, encouraging child support
defiance is another staple of the movement. These usurious child “extortion”
orders serve to cut fathers off at the knees, preventing them from further
litigating their own cases in pursuit of their children and justice.

If it were practical, the
universal withholding of child support—a child support strike— would indeed be
a catastrophic WMD lobbed upon the system. However, though there will always
be heroic individuals willing to stare down the state, lose their homes and
jobs and livelihood and ultimately serve jail sentences, it has to be
acknowledged that it is simply not realistic to expect NCP wage earners en
masse to quit their jobs, learn to earn their living under the table, and
essentially go underground. Very noble perhaps, but not practical for the mass
of men living “lives of quiet desperation.”

I don’t discourage this
tactic. I know that I did not find it practical. Each man can wrestle with his
own conscience. I say nothing further about any effort to promote an organized
child support resistance movement.

1. Micro-level
resistance—the individual court case

The good news is that there
are many other areas where resistance is not only possible but can also be
extremely effective, and furthermore contains little risk of loss of liberty
or criminalization. In fact, this personal, micro-level resistance must be
the very heart of the future of the Fathers Rights movement.

If a substantial fraction of
men refused to cooperate with the divorce/custody machine we could draw blood
and force the system to take notice. By attacking its lifeblood: money, we
would be returning fire.

First off, it requires that
we convince men to educate themselves so they gain the confidence to “take
charge of [their] case,” as Liberty Bell Union advertises[4].
Fathers must be encouraged to demand shared physical and legal custody of
their children (unless demanding sole custody is appropriate), and not permit
their attorneys, if they insist on using one, from coercing them into settling
for NCP status with a survivable financial arrangement. Presently, far more
men than we might want to admit actually agree to become noncustodial
parents. Yes, we all understand the legal pressures that are brought to bear,
but in the final analysis, too many men make this compromise.

When more fathers refuse to
accept the business-as-usual NCP status, this alone will have a powerful
effect. The courts will become even more overburdened. The laws of physics
require that an object move along the path of least “action,” i.e., the path
of least resistance. Non-cooperation applies an opposing force to the status
quo that demands fathers be transformed into “noncustodial parents.”

The next step would be to
convince all these fathers who don’t cave on custody and are willing to head
to trial, to refuse to cooperate with the standard operating procedure:
appointing a GAL, getting various psychological evaluations, bringing in more
“experts,” accepting supervised visitation, hiring more attorneys, etc. A
judge cannot force you to cooperate with a GAL investigation, nor to get a
psychological evaluation. Of course you will be warned, even by your attorney,
that such actions can only harm you in the long run.

Men must not merely tell the
judge at the hearing that he will, for example, not cooperate with a GAL
investigation; he must put his objections in his pleadings, stating the reason
why: “guardians ad litem are fundamentally biased against fatherhood.” Imagine
if three out of every four divorce pleadings contained language where the
father claimed that the system fundamentally discriminates against men,
perhaps making use of boilerplate language of feminist bias in the courts that
can be provided by our organizations. Imagine the impact on these GALs who
rely on court appointments for their income. Typically, a GAL might bill for a
total of ten or so hours of visits with the parents and their collaterals.
Well, guess what? That income is suddenly halved. And furthermore, a father
would not need to dredge up the law citation and write a pleading as to why he
should not pay for half of the GAL fee. He cannot be asked to pay for any
of it if he has refused to cooperate at the outset, in writing, when
the GAL is assigned to the case!

The stance of the father in a
custody case, with or without a 209A order should be simply this:

“I demand shared physical and legal custody of my children.
If my soon-to-be ex-wife disagrees, then I demand sole physical and legal
custody, and will permit as much visitation to her as she requires, within
reason. Furthermore, if the court intends to deny me the minimally acceptable
shared custody of my children, I demand it produce findings of fact as to why
and how I am a danger or harmful to my child. If the court intends to take
custody of my child away from me, I demand it give the reasons why I am unfit
and constitute a danger to my child.”

Then, fold arms, sit back,
and watch the system spin its wheels.

This is not in any way a
guarantee that a given father will do better in court if he follows this
advice. It is a description of how the successful Fathers Rights
resistance movement must operate on the micro level. This is
something that practically every divorcing father can do with no risk of
criminalization. In fact, I assert that it is incumbent on every father in a
high conflict divorce to act this way. The Fatherhood Coalition sought
to encourage this behavior as standard practice in Massachusetts to mixed
results.

2. Macro-level
resistance—everywhere else!

Resistance to the perfect
beast extends beyond one’s own personal case. Far too many good men have “hung
separately.” Most of the activities that various organizations and individuals
do now can be characterized as resistance. Every freeway sign. Every letter to
the editor. Every courthouse protest. Every verbal testimony at a public
hearing. This is all resistance, and of course it must continue. The
publicity-stunt tactics of Fathers-4-Justice exemplify the type of
protesting known as “direct action.” Clearly, Matt O’Connor’s creation has
been the most successful Fathers Rights enterprise in the entire history of
the movement. Combining humor with the simplest, most indefensible issue of
the War: NCP fathers denied visitation with their children, propelled
Fathers-4-Justice through the media’s lace curtain in England.

2.1 Bringing the War to the streets: Counter-demonstrations

Until such time as we in the
US can muster a “thousand people in the street” to support Fathers Rights, it
only makes sense to confine public protests to counter-demonstrations. On this
there is no shortage. Out opponents in and out of government provide a
constant stream of public events that are protest-worthy: judicial education
junkets, child support enforcement PR events, domestic violence propaganda
events and similar male-bashing love fests, and here in Massachusetts,
Governor’s Council judicial approval hearings, to name just a few. Such
counter-demonstrations can be successful with even a small number of
participants.

Important point: These
counter-demonstrations should not be necessarily peaceful and respectful. We
are protesting people and institutions that deserve not respect, but
disdain. With respect to peaceful versus... not peaceful, I believe that
the success of our movement will eventually require civil disobedience, in
which “peaceful” becomes a relative term.

2.2 Bringing the War to the courts

Certainly, legal challenges
to state actors, whether via constitutional grounds, class action suits,
challenges to Title IV-d federal child support statutes, RICO pleadings, or
any of the other legal mechanisms that countless Fathers Rights advocates have
tried, must continue.

This is the area where the
Fathers Rights men who have become legal expertscan shine. The Fathers Rights resistance movement must apply a constant
pressure to the legal and judicial power structures. There must be a constant
barrage of lawsuits hammering the gates of judicial power.

2.3 Study Wars: Bringing the War to the university halls

Also, our movement should
conduct its own agenda-driven (though fair and accurate) research. Steve
Basile of the Fatherhood Coalition produced two groundbreaking studies
on the issuance of abuse protection orders in one Massachusetts district court[5].
The studies have been referenced numerous times in subsequent social science
research. As a result of Basile’s work, the state responded with an iron fist
to prevent future “mischief.” They quickly passed legislation making abuse
prevention court dockets off limits to the public. Consequently, court data is
going to be increasingly more difficult to obtain for future unbiased research
in Massachusetts. The history of Basile’s research and the response to it are
well documented on the Fatherhood Coalition web site[6].

But there is no shortage of
fruitful areas for research. A high priority should be placed on the
mainstream media’s bias on coverage of domestic violence. It would not be too
difficult a task to take one big media entity, such as The Boston Globe,
and prove their bias by comparing the difference in language used in their
coverage of domestic violence stories; specifically, how the appearance of the
words “domestic violence” in their stories depends on the sex of the victim.

IV Summary

In the spirit of the old saw
about what to do first when trapped in a hole, the first order of business for
our movement is to “stop digging.” We must first stop the bleeding by
correcting the cardinal errors of the past:

Stop trying to make Fathers Rights politically correct
by disguising it as a “children’s” rights or “parent’s” rights issue. The
problem is the discrimination, persecution and criminalization of men
via their transformation into noncustodial parents.

Stop using the language of our enemies, such as
“parent” where “father” is meant and “partner” in lieu of “husband” or
“wife,” as well as “gender” instead of “sex,” “child support,” and “pro
choice.” The power of words can’t be overestimated.

Make abuse protection reform the top legislative
priority. Real shared parenting legislation can’t succeed until its primary
enemies have first been de-fanged. Progress on child custody will come
quicker if we first fix the abuse prevention laws, which will implicitly
disempower the domestic violence regime that prevents shared parenting
legislation from becoming law.

With respect to the
pro-active side of a resistance movement, all the macro-level activities
mentioned require further elaboration and detailed planning, i.e., a true
blueprint. All the activities that people share on the various Fathers
Rights blogs and email lists are all wonderful examples of this part of the
movement. Of course, it goes without saying, the more organized andconcerted the efforts the better.

What I believe is needed
first, however, is acknowledgement and action on the other, ideological
aspects of the movement that I have taken great pains to define in this
document. To wit, the Fathers Rights movement must first “get its mind right.”

Understand the real
nature of the problem, and stop hiding from it.

Understand the social,
cultural and political environment within which the movement exists and why
it has been unsuccessful so far.

Obtain universal buy-in
on the “War on Fatherhood” messaging; and solicit willingness to engage the
enemy.

Promulgate our own
lexicon. We are engaged in a “War on Fatherhood.” We spell it “Fathers
Rights,” not “father’s rights,” or “fathers’ rights.” Capitalized, no
punctuation, as is correct for a proper noun. We are “fathers.” We do not
have “partners,” we have wives or girlfriends. If we are in favor of
abortion, then we demand abortion rights for men; if we oppose it we are not
“anti-choice,” we are “anti-abortion” and “pro-life.”

[3]
Governor Deval Patrick responding to questions from Renny Del Gallo and
Will Smith, August 5, 2007, Great Barrington Town Hall meeting.
www.berkshirefatherhood.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=699&cntnt01returnid=69

[4]Liberty Bell Union, the pro se training program designed by and for
Fathers Rights advocates. www.libertybellunion.org

[5]
Steve Basile, “A Measure of Court Response to Requests for Protection,”
Journal of Family Violence, 20 (3)June 2005, and “Comparison
of Abuse Alleged by Same- and Opposite-Gender Litigants as Cited in
Request for Abuse Prevention Orders,” Journal of Family Violence,
19 (1) February 2004